"He who sows melons begets melons, He who sows beans begets beans"
--Chinese proverb
When we see a family that is poor, we all want to help them rise above their poverty, more so if there are kids involved. This is one of the things that the West does much better than the Chinese. Helping people in need, even if they are not related to you in anyway. The trouble is, early success of lifting the poor by their bootstrap has been replaced with inter-generational welfare dependence. Upward social mobility seems to be decreasing with time. This decrease in upward mobility is coinciding with a huge increase in meritocracy in America. In the fifties, Black people must use separate bathrooms as whites. Needless to say, they are limited to only work certain positions. Today, a Black person became president of the United States. All sorts of positions in corporations, military and government, even in leadership positions, are filled with women and non-whites, something which would be unimaginable back in the fifties. At the same time, college has never been more ubiquitous. In 1950, just 4.7 % of women and 7.3% of men in the U.S. completed a four year degree or more. In 2015, the numbers are 32.3% and 32.7%. The number of people with some college ballooned to 65%. With some community colleges charging nominal fees and now there are talks of making them free, college, the instrument which are used by the poor to pull themselves up by the bootstrap, has never been more accessible by the poor. How does one reconcile these seemingly diametrically opposed trends?
Charles Murray's book Coming Apart documented a number of trends. One of them was the fact that colleges, being available to ever bigger segment of the population, acted as a great sorting machine which separate out people based on how much talent they have. Further, the effect of this sorting was that people of similar talents tend to find each other in college, they worked in similar jobs and married each other, something which did not happened pervasively in the fifties. The great sorting machine has now produced a stratified society based on talent, to the point where together, the gifted ones have managed to pass their abilities to the next generation at ever greater frequencies. This is called assortative mating. It is the only explanation that can explain the increase meritocracy at hiring, increase access to colleges by the poor and a decreasing social mobility at the same time. The poor are not moving up the economic ladder because our meritocracy have already lifted the gifted poor out of poverty, where they married other talented people and produce the next generation that increasingly inherit their abilities. The remaining pool of poor people also increasingly marry other poor and are producing talented next generation at an ever decreasing frequency due to this assortative mating.
How exactly does this "passing down" work? Broadly speaking, there are three things that we pass to our kids. For some with money, we spend it on their early development. We pass down our culture. Finally we pass down our genes. Liberals like to complain that the poor do not have access to an enriched environment that the rich lavish on their kids. The trouble is, since the sixties, there are all sorts of programs aimed to change the environment for the poor. Without exception, there was nothing to show for the billions that was spent. The Milwaukee Project spent $14 million dollars(a lot of money in the sixties) on just 40 kids. At the end, the kids performed no better academically than the control group that had an average IQ of 80.
The inter-generational transfer of culture was also looked at in detail. At the end, studies like the Minnesota Twin Adoption Study have found that the shared environment, which is how the culture gets passed down to the next generation, has almost no effect on the academic achievements of the next generation. Most of the impact on academic performance come from genetics (from studying how identical twins adopted at birth correlate with each other in scholastic aptitude).
This goes counter to our intuitions. We would like to think that all our hard work raising the next generation counts for something. In a way it does, but we have provided an environment that is well beyond the minimum threshold and it is yielding decreasing returns. Think of it this way, if you grow wheat in the mountains of the Himalayas using primitive farming techniques, the wheat does not get enough of everything it needs to grow to its potential. In this case, improving the environment (more water and fertilizer, stronger sun shine) will likely increase crop yield. However, if you are growing wheat in modern day Kansas, where everything is close to being ideal, the crop gets everything it needs. Adding more fertilizer or water does nothing to improve yield. In this environment, the variations in genetics stand out as the only thing that produces differentiated outcomes. Wheat is not that picky, all it needs is some minimum threshold of sunshine, water and fertilizer. Adding more of each ingredient after the threshold does very little to enhance the yield. In a way, people are like that too. As long as the kids are fed and clothed, not under undue stress and have access to learning material, they will do about as good as they are ever going to do. Anything beyond that yields ever decreasing return.
In the meritocracy like the United States, where college is available to anyone willing to go, genetics have become the new dividing line in society. In this society, assortative mating have created a permanent upper and under class based on ability, ability that is increasingly pass down to the next generation by the genes we pass to them. In the environment of plenty that we are in today, genetics is the single biggest factor in determining if someone will remain permanently poor.
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